As the indefatigable voice for Tasmania’s built heritage, outspoken columnist Leo Schofield has again served up a message to those who should be responsible for saving our historic buildings.
In his end-of-year assessment of 2009’s highs and lows, via his weekly Mercury column, he noted among disappointments the State Government’s ongoing failure to ensure the future of this built heritage. And with this he expressed the hope that they will try harder in 2010.
But there is some action at the local government level, evidenced by the Hobart City Council recently refusing an application by Wellspring Anglican Church in Sandy Bay for a big development project at Grosvenor and Lord Streets (Margot Giblin: First on TT, HERE)..
The church proposed a new auditorium (seating for 270, cost of the overall work understood to be $2 million-plus), behind the historic St Peter’s Church that fronts Grosvenor Street.
To make way for this auditorium the church wanted to demolish a Californian bungalow it owns next door at 15 Lord Street, as well as other building alterations.
The loss of that bungalow – and the appearance of the auditorium – would impact on the attractiveness of what is regarded as one of Sandy Bay’s most coveted older streetscapes. Indeed, the bungalow is one of six adjacent Lord Street properties on the Tasmanian Heritage Register (15 Lord Street was listed in 1998, the church having bought it the year before) – and there is old St Peter’s itself, an important link to early Hobart.
The council rejection gave eight reasons, mostly heritage, under the City of Hobart Planning Scheme 1982, which includes the requirement that 15 Lord Street be preserved.
The council saw the demolition as contrary to the Planning Scheme, which required retention of the house “in the absence of practical reasons for its removal either wholly or in part”. The council saw the bungalow as being of cultural significance.
It also saw the intended development as detracting from the significance of St Peter’s, which is of undoubted heritage importance – a fact recognised in the documents for the development submitted by an architect and heritage consultant. Of St Peter’s he wrote that the Henry Hunter-designed building had to be retained because of its “high historic cultural significance as a Victorian Rustic Gothic Church”.
It was the original Mariners’ Church on the Hobart waterfront in the 1860s. It was later closed and relocated to its existing site.
There is an interesting story to recall on this. Emmaline and Edward Pearce, of Battery Point’s Narryna, Hampden Road – today’s lovely Narryna Heritage Museum – bought the bricks and stone of the Mariners’ Church and donated them for St Peter’s construction in 1918 at its new site.
The Pearces made the donation to honour the memory of their son, Second-Lieutenant Clyde Bowman Pearce, of the 52nd Battalion, AIF. He was killed in World War One, on June 10, 1917, at Messines Ridge in France. As a platoon officer he was leading a charge on the enemy when he was caught on wire and killed by German machinegun fire.
It is also worth reflecting here on other links between Tasmanian Anglican churches and their recognition of wartime sacrifice.
There are the strikingly beautiful War Memorial Windows in Holy Trinity Church, North Hobart, honouring the 101 servicemen of the parish who died in WWI. Today, of course, this is no longer Anglican property, the church having been deconsecrated, closed in late 2007 and the building handed to the Greek Orthodox Church.
And there is the chapel at Montgomery Park, Coningham, which has the clam shell honouring Sister May Hayman, the Anglican missionary nurse murdered in Papua by the Japanese in 1942. With the Anglican Church’s decision to sell Montgomery Park the future of the chapel remains unclear.
It’s time the RSL took a serious look at what’s happening with Tasmanian Anglican property containing war memorials.
